Haruki_NLI

@Axecon I remember Ishihara telling Nintendo the Switch would fail. And look where we are now.

I also remember third parties being all onboard with their Smash amiibo giving costumes in Mario Maker and Yoshi's Woolly World complete with unique audio.

Except Pokémon. You got the sprite in Mario Maker but no audio, and nothing in Woolly World.

TPC just seems to refuse to play nice.

@darkswabber Yes, but while this is just physical sales, the launch week physical sales of both World and Rise are 1.3m units in Japan.

So that means one of two things: either Wilds sold the same and it's basically 50/50 digital, or it's done less than the previously assumed 60/40 digital of Rise which was the figures we were going off of from Nintendo's data back in 2021.

Either way, it points down.

Not that it matters, it's over 8m units worldwide already surpassing both games.

I wouldnt be shocked if its download required on other systems too. A lot of PS5 games come with just a few MBs on the disk.

I remember back when VC was a thing, everyone just wanted a subscription model because they weren't willing to pay $5 for an old ROM.

And yet here we are now.

And remember, a lot of third parties allegedly weren't seeing much from VC sales. Heck, games got delisted there quite a bit. And if you looked at the top sellers on the eShops, it was always first party retro titles or new releases, and the third parties were left high and dry because more often than not no one cared about those games outside of a moral high ground.

And this here we are. Third parties get a big lump sum for getting a game on NSO, so they don't need to worry about actually selling it anymore, they get paid regardless.

Nintendo gets more money for recurring subscriptions, instead of piecemeal purchases.

And we the consumer gets what Nintendo thinks we've been shouting at them for for years: old games in a Netflix style service.

Everybody wins!

Wait, what do you mean you actually want Virtual Console back? MAKE UP YOUR MINDS

@LXP8 To adjust for exchange rates. The real cost of the unit remained the same instead of being more expensive here.

And yet with how a lot of sites are reporting the figures you'd think the end was nigh. 30% down YoY, stagnating sales, old hardware, no games coming out, only 4m units last quarter! Sales targets revised down!

My brother in christ it's 8 years old, never had a price cut and just became the third system ever to hit 150m units, and oh god forbid a system that old at that price still sells over 10m units in it's 8th year.

But the software is down too! Yes on a system that has passed 1.3bn units of software in 8 years. With 72 first party 1m unit sellers. With games selling so we'll the profits off of each can fund smaller niche games for the next two decades without taking anything away from the next Mario Kart!

This is the first time I've ever seen investors react "logically"

The ultimate problem is the idea that you can't please everyone. Just as much of a fuss will be kicked up by refusing some games on a platform just as much as letting others on.

So screw it, do what Steam does and just let it all ride.

I'm surprised. The last time Limp Biskit was used in an anime they had to be renamed Flaccid Pancake

@Not_Soos and yet in the Switch generation Nintendo funded and published both a Marvel and DC licensed game

@CrankyBonesGaming Given they connect via Bluetooth, you'd assume they would.

@NintendoDad You had to transfer all Wii data onto an SD Card, and then load that data into a Wii U's memory, which then pulled that info from local storage to verify, so that would be the only way: load it onto an SD card and have Switch convert the file formats over to verify.

But all retail Wii games were never released digitally on Wii so....yeah that won't work.

And they wouldn't base it on save data because that's just exploitable.

@NicolausCamp It's a vicious cycle, but the cracks are showing nowadays. It's why those "Play it early" things SEGA, Ubisoft and others are so so fond of are working to alarming levels.

Though Star Wars Outlaws nuking people's save data when it was found to be a bug during the early access period may have let a lot of core gamers realise the state of things.

But then again, we have review sites republishing FIFA reviews year after year because nothing changes, so it doesn't matter how self aware the core audience is, they still go for it.

Sad really.

@NicolausCamp I'm not defending it. I'm replying to people's suggestions of what they want done about it and so far none have been based in reality. Just a lot of "could have, should have" based on things that weren't put in place with foresight by the company over a decade ago.

In my mind, this is no different than something like SMTV, Persona 5 Royal, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, or any other definitive edition of a game that comes out just looking prettier. The market has shown time and time again that people are willing and able to pay for it and accept it, so why wouldn't a business not do it?

Does it suck. Yes. But like $70 minimum for a new release, DLC, pre order bonuses, micro transactions, season passes, paying for online, cloud versions, collectors editions with a download code, no physical releases in the retail box, limited time content, live services, unnecessary remasters on systems that can already play the games, disc drives being an optional add on....the list goes on, the market spoke, and here we are after years of moaning and it's still a thing.

And to be honest, this industry and Nintendo has bigger issues than a $60 remaster of a Wii game outsourced to a Polish remastering studio, that people are nowhere near as loud about.

@datamonkey Okay, so the Wii was physical only and didnt have an account system and the 3DS didn't register physical carts to your account like Switch does.

So if you had a digital copy of Returns 3D I guess?

@Truegamer79 Fiscal year runs April 1 to March 31.

@datamonkey How exactly would you verify that someone bought this game on Wii or 3DS to make that work on Switch? Take it in good faith?

Complaining in 3....2....1....

I imagine most third parties weren't happy with their VC sales. I remember that going around at one point.

Also I remember everyone wanting VC to be a subscription service instead of piecemeal. Wonder what happened to that when they got their wish.

Seeing the argument that it should be $20 because that's what the Nintendo Selects version of the inferior 3DS release cost is just....weird.

I guess the Horizon remaster should have been free to all since that was the lowest price Sony gave the original out at, quite literally giving it away to anyone during lockdowns.

Welcome to capitalism. It's the best we got so suck it up, and over 6 billion agree.

@Clyde_Radcliffe People may well think it's just a bigger Switch 1.

Then again no one thought the PS2 was a bigger PS1 even though it's controller was visually identical, just black instead of grey and the number on the box went up by one. ;P

@JohnnyMind I imagine it's a classic case of SEGA not bothering to tell him or not knowing he owned the rights, and Johnny also not being told until Paramount asked for permission it finally clicked to what SEGA should have been doing under his contract to write the song in the first place.

This is SEGA who famously lost the rights to the original version of Endless Possibility once Sony bought the record label that handled Bowling for Soup, and then shuttered it, which means legitimately no one knows who owns the song anymore.

And the same publisher who doesn't actually own any of the music from Sonic 1 and 2 and has to pay the composer every time they want to use it.

Or seemingly Sonic Rush's music either given it got removed from Generations this year.

@rjejr Nintendo released a slide in their last IR presentation showing companies they are developing relations with for Switch 2 and From Software was one of them.

So yes, they DO know what it is, they are just outright lying because of NDAs.

@Olliemar28 So excited you might wee.

@Matroska To be fair, looking at when that quote was purported to have been stated, it's not like patches were a common thing, so a bad game was very much bad forever.

@Serpenterror The phone versions are also already on Switch so....

@IceClimbersMain I better start pirating PS5 games with how some of those are starting to run, if that's the justification

Ah yes. The famous HD-2D technology that has been developed for over 7 years. The HD-2D engine as it is called.

Or as the rest of us call it: Unreal Engine. Because that's what it is.

And therein lies the frame rate issues.

I mean, look at some of the stuff other companies have patented over the years.

Like SEGA and their overhead directional arrow. Or Namco and mini games while loading. Or WB and the Nemesis system that even they aren't using.

Don't hate the players, hate the game.

@Buizel People have gone into the code. There is a manually placed 31.5 FPS cap.

Not 30. Not 60. 31.5.

And sure they clearly picked resolution over frame rate, but that doesn't explain the decision to cap the game at a frame rate that leaves it looking very uneven and choppy.

@Samalik It wasn't just laziness.

It was incompetence. A single line of code causes one CPU core on Switch to be overworked and there is a manually coded 31.5FPS cap.

Words cannot begin to describe how that even happens.

@BulkSlash You'd think, but they also somehow managed to massively overwork one single CPU core with the game.

Again, it's really shoddily ported.

@BulkSlash Drop the resolution a little bit, and remove the cap. No over clicking needed apparently

@SBandy1 To be fair, the way Eurogamer worded it was also a bit weird. Fine resolution and visuals, frame rate is a bit weird, don't touch it with a pole apparently.

Anyway, this game is actually really, really weird @NinChocolate, because it's not a lack of power causing this issue.

Turns out in the games code, the game is actually coded to run at 31.5FPS. Why? Who the hell knows. But it's in there, that's the manually set frame rate cap.

In fact, modders have already gone in and changed that, and made it run at 60. So again, I have no idea what Sonic Team is up to here. The game also for no reason has really high CPU usage on one core specifically.

Again, it seems like Sonic Team just kinda crapped out the Generations portion and expected brute force to fix it. But they also redid cutscenes and UI to be a higher resolution so it's really weird.

And on OC it can't hit 120FPS by default because....well the game gets hard locked to 60 unless you force it which the original didn't do.

Again, it's like they cared but also didn't.

But it IS a Sonic remaster and history has shown they will always make it somehow worse than the last version of the game. Always.

@Bratwurst35 Sonic Generations was only a couple hours. It's only when you go for the 90 side missions and Red Rings that the length goes anywhere.

So this is likely a 3 hour to beat deal or so.

So Nintendo bought Astral Chain from them, and they bought Wonderful 101 back.

And SEGA still owns Bayonetta because that's probably just easy money from royalties.

@ClickBrick I believe they asked because you couldn't play Super Mario Party on a Switch Lite,
you need to buy separate Joy-Con.

The absolute insanity of the timing of this announcement. You just know some intern is fist pumping the air.

@Yellowshi There's 4? I thought it was only ever three because that's all I heard people talk about outside of how the series is cursed by real world events.

@Yellowshi I mean, a 3+4 Reboot Camp wouldn't happen given there was only three games.

But also, y'all commenters need to be patient.

"Nintendo isn't doing anything with the IP"

They released remakes in 2023. This isn't the late 80s where you can slap a game out in 6 months. Good heavens

Wait, it's on Chapter 5 now? I stopped once the aliens showed up a few years back. I also skipped the initial Marvel season back then too.

@Strumpan The last official number is 150m from 2011, discontinued in 2013. That implies people believe Sony produced another 5-10m PS2 systems in 2012.

Somehow.....I doubt it.

@westman98 Is it a toy, or is it a video game? Is the Switch a handheld, or a home console? Is the PSVR2 it's own platform with exclusives, or an accessory? Is the the GameBoy Colour a new platform or a revision?

We can try and pigeon-hole everything into neat little compartments to suit our narratives, but those pigeons are long dead.

My take? It's a video game. It comes with software to be played, on a games console that plays video games, with inputs received by the software on the dedicated hardware platform that are sent by the player. You can say its a toy, but that thing came with a game attached.

@-wc- I read that whole thing, and I meant to say wide appeal, as in casting a wide net, not mass appeal, thats me getting my terms mixed up. Whoopsie.

As for this: "I'm a gamer, not a banker. I miss the days when we thought of Nintendo as a group of brilliant creative minds making mind blowing games, rather than a bunch of uptight rich guys in suits trying not to rock the boat."

See, I'm the opposite. I'm a businessman and economist, not really a gamer anymore, and that's because I spent years studying economics and business analysis, and once you look behind that curtain, your whole worldview changes, and it's not great.

Thing is, you dont care about how a business is doing overall, and that's absolutely fine. Except you do, because under capitalism and our societal conditioning, every decision you make, every job you have, exists to just fuel the machine. You go earn money to spend it to live, and if those businesses drop, our way of life collapses.

It absolutely sucks, like absolutely bites, but sadly, that's the way it is, and so that's how I look at the world.

There's no ethical consumption under capitalism after all, sadly.

And now I'm depressed again. Oh dear.

Anyway, ethical and societal conditioning tangent aside, yeah, Nintendo is a business, they wanna make money. I mean at the end of the day the only way we can impact that is to.....not give them money, en masse. But we could also collectively decide one day that money has no value and just start over again and reset every currency, but we wont, because not everyone thinks the same.

Best you can do is just hope. And that sucks, it really does. I'm not getting the games I like anymore, so I jumped ship a while ago. I also saw the way the industry was going and decided I'd rather watch from the sidelines to see if I can snipe some golden parachutes before they land

@-wc- I'll step in for this.

The Switch has sold so well, so they extended it's life with two additional years of content around the time a new game would have released for the Switch.

This is largely done to maximise banked ROI and pure profit from further sales to not only fund more niche games for the Switch and broaden it's appeal, but also make the next Mario Kart, which is almost assured to launch around the next platform.

As history has shown, Mario Kart is a mass appeal, truly evergreen title on a successful system, and its launch timing is imperative. Therefore, keeping resources back and not releasing a Mario Kart exclusively for Switch means there is no potential delay in the timing of a new title for a new system, and thus springboarding what will hopefully be a successful platform.

Your second point, there is an exclusive Mario Kart game on Switch: Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, which was licensed to Velan Studios by Nintendo. As of December 2022, it had sold less than 2m units. Now sure this is largely down to its higher price, complexity etc. but it also stands in line with sequels to mega popular games on the same platform either flatlining or falling behind. Look at Tears of the Kingdom compared to Breath of the Wild, or 3D World to Odyssey.

Now sure there are exceptions to that rule, Kirby and the Forgotten Land for example, and Pokemon, but those titles also occupy a different space to Mario Kart.

Mario Kart is, by design, a game with infinite longevity.

Much like how many live service games go for a decade or longer, Mario Kart, and to a lesser extent Splatoon, Animal Crossing and Smash Bros., are games that you get on your system, get DLC, and thats your fill until the next platform.

For the mass market, the people driving the profits and the sales, spending some of your money on a sequel to a game that wont hit as high, when that money can be better spent on making more niche titles that draw in people like us on this site, is the play. The mass market gets their fill, we get our niche games.

And that has been the true strength of the Switch brand. All the money from Animal Crossing, Zelda, Mario, Mario Kart, Smash etc. selling so well so consistently hasn't just been funnelled into the next game from that same studio in the way Sony and many other companies do it, it goes to games like a Bayonetta, Advance Wars, Mario & Luigi, Pikmin, Metroid.

In other companies, the profit from God of War goes to the next God of War and thats your lot.

@JohnnyMind Thats true of every business. If the year ends in 2025, its fiscal year 2025, most likely because that would be the final transaction dates for that fiscal year, thus the year overall falls into 2025.

It's weird, because even though most of the year is in 2024, the actual financial year runs through 2025.

Even at my job, we have weekly sales figures for year 2025.

You'd think after the Collections kept doing well, and Megaman 11, the first new game in 8 years at that point became the best selling Megaman game, and that was followed by the BN Collection selling incredibly well, that SOMETHING would have happened by now but no. It's just more Resident Evil and the odd Monster Hunter.

There's only two more possible collections they can do. After that, it has to be new games.

@BANJO It would seem not. The preorder bonus Ultimate Points is lower on Switch....for some reason.

@UltimateOtaku91 Next Level Ganes' next project will most likely land in 2025. Since being acquired by Nintendo they've only grown in size and even before then managed to keep a cadence of one game every three years. Of course, famously, Nintendo didn't tell them when to release the games, Next Level dictated that themselves.

2010 - Punch Out
2013 - Luigi's Mansion 2
2016 - Metroid Prime Federation Force
2019 - Luigi's Mansion 3
2022 - Mario Strikers Battle League

So it stands to reason with every other game they make being Luigi's Mansion and it being nearly 3 years since Strikers, the next game lands in 2025.

Now, will it be Luigi's Mansion? Maybe. Maybe not. But with how the series has only grown in sales and quality under them it's simply a matter of when, or if they want to keep LM4 as a mid life title.

@UltimateOtaku91 I think part of this is my frustration at hearing "Its not worth the cost" over the past few years. Be it a remake, a remaster, a 2D Metroid or Mario game, a Zelda which is built on the previous one, a Pokemon game....it just gets old, and at the end of the day, it doesnt matter what people do.

Annoyingly, humans have free will. But the loudest ones tend to be the ones unhappy with what others do.

@UltimateOtaku91 Look, I get it. I do.

But if I, or any other individual want to spend their money in this free market for a good or service they deem worthwhile for the expense involved, then that's on them. They won't chastise you for how you choose to spend your money. So why try and tell others how to spend theirs?

Remember, lots of people moaned that they didn't want to have to buy the games, rather have a Netflix style model.

Well, here you go. And now you all want to just buy them.

Problem is, if that was the case most publishers wouldn't bother. We already saw that with the move from Wii to Wii U and 3DS. Loads of games and systems on Wii that just weren't elsewhere.

Why? The sales didn't warrant the effort of licensing to Nintendo to sell the games.

@LadyCharlie To be fair, you go from LM2 selling what it did to LM3 selling way more, and that's a lot of people to whom this game is probably new.